Soul murderers

I was originally going to call this post "Narcissist, psychopath, sociopath or bastard?" 

I will later explain the differences between the first three types of sick individual, but hope to ultimately show that when it comes to assessing these people, labels and descriptors/diagnoses are relatively unimportant. It's what they are capable of doing that matters.

Let's start with bastards, as they are, by far, the most common and least dangerous type of person. In fact, bastards (sometimes called arseholes, or 'assholes' for any American/Canadian readers) are extremely pleasant people compared to narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths.

While I have not had an intimate personal relationship with a narcissist (something for which I am eternally grateful), avoiding bastards altogether has proved an impossibility. That's because bastards are EVERYWHERE. Every single one of us knows several 'bastards', a lot of us will have worked with or for one, slept with one or even married one, and most of us will be 'friends' with the odd bastard or two. Bastards are generally OK people actually - in small doses, at least. We all have a bit of bastard in us. Bastards can be funny, charming, sincere and charismatic. Underneath, they are as vulnerable and frailly human as we all are, and just want to love and be loved, as we all do. They just need to work on a few issues. (But, again, don't we all?) A bastard might well fuck you up and break your heart, but will feel a little bit bad about it, and might even shed a few genuine tears of regret over their bastardness. The majority of them will just carry on being bastards though, unfortunately.

And then, I suppose, we have the "narseholes", the exceptionally shitty bastards with an extra dollop of abomination....

...While narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths are a whole new league of awfulness. They will fuck you up, break your heart, brutalise your spirit, turn your entire life to shit and then smirk at the sight of your shuddering, sobbing, desolate carcass before sashaying off to their next victim, or their next 'game'. Every time they see that their actions have resulted in the pain of someone else, they experience a frisson of delight.  They will swell with self-satisfaction. These people have something PROFOUNDLY wrong with them, and although there are subtle differences between how their individual sicknesses are manifested, and the techniques they use, the advisory warning is the same for all: AVOID AVOID AVOID. Run a million miles in the opposite direction and never look back.

As I have got older, my 'bullshit radar' has improved immeasurably. I no longer tolerate manipulation of any kind, at any time, from anyone, for any reason. But believe me, for far too long, I allowed myself to be a doormat - I accepted all kinds of shitty behaviour, and in the case of my mother (just because she was my mother), I just kept going back for more. Over and over and over again. I simply didn't believe I deserved any better. I never questioned it.

As you can imagine, this mindset didn't bode well for all the other relationships I had in my life, but in fact I was incredibly fortunate because I had three amazing, loving long-term boyfriends during my teens and twenties (the last of whom ended up becoming my husband). These guys saved my life. Where my mother made me feel ugly, unloveable, pointless and worthless, they showed me that the opposite is true. But things could have been very different. When you have it drummed into you that nobody will ever want you, you project a forlorn desperation that the most unscrupulous, heartless users tend to zone in on. And so the cycle continues. The abuse you receive at home from the people who are supposed to care for you typically sets you up for a lifetime of abject misery.


This is why I believe the worst narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths are SOUL MURDERERS. Make no mistake, murdering someone's soul is no less abhorrent than murdering their physical body. It just takes much, much longer. The process itself is EVIL beyond belief. It defies description. They literally feed on the pain of others, because it acts like a temporary balm; it distracts from the pain inside themselves. Your pain makes them feel good, makes them feel like they can achieve something, even if that 'something' is wholly despicable. So they will keep on doing it, over and over again... They truly are utterly, utterly mad in the purest, most appalling sense of the word. 

Most people who grew up under the iron fist of a narcissistic parent have had their identities and spirits crushed by the experience, and their concept of what 'love' means becomes skewed beyond recognition. Thus they almost inevitably end up becoming entangled with disordered people during their adult lives. (Perhaps the most masochistic part of us thinks we can somehow 'fix' these freaks? Being empathic people, as survivors of narcissistic abuse so often are, surely we are put on this earth to conquer hate with love, banish misunderstanding and rage with compassion, patience and empathy... Except, sadly, life doesn't work like that in reality...)

The dark triad is a group of three personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad 

It is crucial that these poisonous, inhumane people are recognised for what they are - soul murderers - so they can be avoided by the rest of us. Sadly, this is not always possible. Why? Because they are all so good at lying, pretending, faking, and garnering support for their delusions - and that applies to ALL of them, no matter what end of the 'psycho/bastard' spectrum they are on, from the everyday callous, self-centred arsehole, through to the scary-as-hell pathological liar and, right over at the farthest end of the continuum, the amoral pathological monster whose very existence depends upon inflicting pain and misery on others. 

We have already looked at what makes somebody a narcissist and seen that narcissism exists on a scale of gradations, "from healthy narcissism to malignant narcissism, with a lot of grey in between". (See the article The Legacy of a Narcissistic Parent and also What is Narcissism? on Dr Karyl McBride's website.) The traits of a person with NPD go way beyond vanity and self-absorption.

The very detailed 'Order of Truth' blog post "Psychopaths, Sociopaths and Narcissists: Similarities and Differences, and Why they are Dangerous" states that these disordered people are, collectively, "a group of humans who are missing those core values that the rest of us experience, and it is they who are responsible for the major problems in the world we see today". The article goes on to say: "Both narcissism and psychopathy are very closely related in their diagnostic criteria because they are variations of the same group of behavioural disorders. The primary difference between a psychopath and a narcissist is that a psychopath does not care about, or need, other people or their opinions to support the psychopath's distorted view of themselves and the world around them, whereas narcissists do." (my emphasis)

Also, it is widely believed that a psychopath's brain is wired differently, in other words it's in their neurobiology, with a well-documented genetic link. This does seem rather fatalistic and simplistic; after all, it's difficult to readily accept that a child is born a psychopath, and will always be a psychopath, no matter what (and no matter how well they are nurtured and socialised into adulthood). However, there is compelling evidence that sometimes, even taking into account the "strengths and limits of parenting", some children appear to be disturbingly maladjusted, callous, violent and unemotional, in other words, dangerous, to the extent that they are unable to modify their behaviour appropriately, form friendships or establish any functional and meaningful connections with the world or with other people. Adults - teachers, parents, health professionals - prove powerless to guide them constructively. Early signs of psychopathy were evident in the case of notorious American serial killer Ted Bundy, for example, despite a relatively content and stable family life.

The article Psychopaths, Children and Evil examines the interplay of 'nature and nurture' (i.e. genes and environment), and it's worth remembering that only a small percentage of psychopaths will be motivated to kill (likewise very few murderers are assessed to be psychopaths). 

Sociopaths and narcissists are generally believed to "become" that way, although there is controversy over exactly how and why. Further confusion over the distinction between narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths arises when 'psychopathy' and 'sociopathy' are conflated (indeed some psychologists, and certainly most of the general public, believe they are interchangeable, and psychopathy is most strongly correlated with DSM-IV antisocial personality disorder). A basic rule is that ALL psychopaths and sociopaths are narcissists, but only the most malignant narcissists are likely to score above 30 on The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), a simple variation of which can be found at http://vistriai.com/psychopathtest/. (My score was 4, in case you're interested).

Resources: 

http://www.minddisorders.com/knowledge/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist.html#ixzz41TmDSdFt

https://orderoftruth.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/psychopaths-sociopaths-and-narcissists-similarities-and-differences-and-why-they-are-dangerous/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_Checklist#The_two_factors

The campaign to advance psychopathy awareness: https://www.gofundme.com/psychopath

"It's such a shame your mother is so useless"

I want to add a quick post about some of the (well-intentioned, sympathetic) comments I have had from friends over the years, who struggle to understand the situation. The remark that stands out for me is: "It's such a shame your mother is so useless."

I have already stated that it is unreasonable of me to expect anyone to know what it is like to have a narcissistic parent, unless they themselves have one. I will now illustrate what I think a "useless" mother might be like:

Imagine you have recently given birth to your first baby, and your mother offers to stay a couple of nights at your house to "give you a hand/a break". You are unsure because you have never really got on with each other, and your breastfeeding has only just established so you're still feeling 'fragile', but you think: "she's my mother, and my baby's grandmother, I've got to make an effort, so let's see how it goes".

Your mother arrives at your house, fusses over the baby, showers you with gifts, but doesn't help out with the cooking or housework and just makes successive cups of tea and watches daytime television. But she gives many cuddles and plenty of moral support and advice, and in spite of being a rather idle and irritating house guest, she does at least allow you some much-needed rest by taking the baby out for walks and playing the 'proud granny'. You disagree on many topics of conversation and her company often leaves you feeling extremely stressed and drained, but ultimately you feel glad and grateful that she came to stay, even if you do ultimately feel even gladder and more grateful when she leaves.

While I think we can all agree that the mother here in this hypothetical scenario is undoubtedly pretty "useless", she has no malice in her heart. As the truism goes, she really does "mean well".

My mother also offered to "help out" when my first baby was a few weeks old. I accepted the offer. I really, really wish I hadn't. Within hours of her arrival, my milk dried up. ("I don't know why you're bothering with breastfeeding anyway," she smirked, sneering as she watched me trying desperately to get some milk to flow from my sore nipples while my baby cried, "I didn't bother breastfeeding you or your sister, I mean, what's the point?'") The visit went downhill from there. (Miraculously, my milk flowed freely once again as soon as she left.)

My decision to breastfeed was not the only one my mother had an opposing opinion about. Of course it wasn't! Apparently, my choice to vaccinate my child was also 'wrong'. (Let's ignore the fact she vaccinated her own children; my mother's staggeringly audacious hypocrisy is, after all, such a steadfast, leviathan and intrinsic aspect of her character that it often just goes entirely unnoticed.)

Knowing that I had decided to vaccinate my baby (and that I'd done extensive research on this topic, like most new parents), she would nevertheless copy me in on emails she sent to her 'crunchy, hippy, alternative-medicine-endorsing' friends with links to 'evidence' that the MMR vaccine causes autism, for example. The obvious implication being: you're such a terrible mother! You are filling your helpless baby with toxins! (No, the irony wasn't lost on me.)

It turned out, unsurprisingly perhaps, that my mother was dismissive or unsupportive of seemingly every decision I made as a new mum. She even sent me a newspaper clipping when I was four months' pregnant (just after my second scan), about a baby who had died a few days after he was born due to a rare disease that can't be picked up by antenatal scans. Tell me, honestly, can you think of anything more unspeakably cruel? Seriously, I wouldn't expect shit like that from my worst fucking enemy.

So, at a time in my life when I most needed my mother to say "You're doing fine, don't worry," she instead ensured that my mind, at its most emotionally chaotic and vulnerable, was plagued with even more guilt, fear and uncertainty. For that alone, I am not sure I can ever forgive her.

So please do not try to tell me my mother was merely 'useless', and certainly not that she ever 'meant well'. I would have done ANYTHING for a 'useless' mother. A 'useless' mother would have felt like an absolute godsend.

Further reading:

The narcissistic mother's game - "In a way, mother is like a black-hole, empty as eternity. She is also a vacuum (yes, nature abhors a vacuum and mother’s constantly trying to be filled).  But I also pity her—more than that, actually. I feel such sorrow for her suffering, because I believe she must be suffering. And I see glimmers of hope. Sometimes, I sense a pause in her emptiness as if her soul is trying to infiltrate the emptiness. Sometimes I sense genuineness. These moments are precious to me and I try to encourage them now that I am strong enough to not feel the arrows she slings at me."

Narcissistic Mothers get away with their secret cruelties - "Narcissistic mothers are exceedingly critical, at times physically violent and psychologically horrifying with their children."

Daughters of narcissistic mothers

Insanity: the best available option

“I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it's the best available option at the time.” 
― Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done

I wrote my first novel in my early 20s - it was about drug abuse, schizophrenia and the close but complex relationship between two sisters.  My own older half-sister died in 1997, aged just 35 years old, having lived her entire adult life in the torturous grip of paranoid schizophrenia, institutionalised for over a third of it, her daily life since the age of 18 having been an endless chemical mindfuck of barbiturates, anti-psychotics, amphetamine, temazepam and various other medications and drugs, both prescribed and illegal. The unrelenting agony of what she endured during her tragically short and anguished life - which included being raped numerous times and having all three of her children taken away from her - is something I cannot bear to think about. I literally cannot bear to think about it, so I can only guess that my mother's psyche has caved in on itself in an effort to block out the trauma of what her firstborn child went through (and, doubtless, a tsunami of not entirely inappropriate guilt about it). 

My older half-sister - let's call her Elle - was rejected by her birth father (my mother's first husband, who by all accounts really did sound like an absolute bastard), and our mother, aged only 22 at the time Elle was born, was not quite ready for the responsibility of motherhood. (She wasn't ready for it in her 30s or 40s, either but hey, nobody's perfect, right?) 

So my grandparents - my mother's mum and dad - became Elle's legal guardians. THAT is what my grandparents did for my mother; that's how much they adored and doted on my mother. They actually RAISED HER FIRSTBORN CHILD FOR HER - they gave Elle a loving, supportive and comfortable home life and basically acted as surrogate parents, while my mother went and lived her life elsewhere, and managed to find the time to meet and marry her second husband (that one didn't last long, either), and several years after that, her third husband, my dad. I know little else about this period of my mother's life and frankly I don't care much about what she did or didn't do, and what did or didn't happen to her during this time. The fact remains: she abdicated responsibility for her firstborn child. I am sure she had her reasons for doing so, but I simply don't care what those reasons are. She did it, and it was her choice to do it, and that choice had horrendous consequences. The fact she has never faced up to this is one of the main reasons she has transmogrified from someone who was undoubtedly once a kind, reasonable and pleasant woman into a twisted Machiavellian villain who would rather see her daughters suffer (all three of us) than face the pain of The Truth.

Three sisters, circa 1983

Now let me try to explain why I still have so much anger against my mother; why when every time someone who presumes to "know" her leaps with such passionate alacrity to her defence, it stokes a raging fire within me. She abandoned her firstborn child. That, in itself, is possibly just about forgivable, if you can allow for extenuating circumstances that nobody (with the possible exception of my mother) knows about, and that I can only guess. But anyone with the smallest glimmer of normalcy would feel GUILT about that, for the rest of their life. I know I would, but then again, I've made the mistake of applying normal emotions and reactions to my mother for most of my life, when it's clear the rules do not apply to her. Instead, my mother uses her tales of woe - tragic first daughter who went mad and died, husbands who mistreated and/or betrayed her, middle daughter who is a total bitch (i.e. has the balls to tell THE TRUTH) - as a means of gaining sympathy and admiration. ("Goodness, you have endured so much, what a strong and amazing person you are! If only your daughters realised how fortunate they are to have such a courageous, devoted and loving mother...") 

I am dumbfounded by some of the bullshit gushing praise her friends have given her over the years, every single one of them UTTERLY IMPERVIOUS to what lies beneath that piously heroic exterior. And of course, my mother laps it up. She doesn't say "Well actually, y'know, I should accept some of the blame for a lot of the crap that's happened to me." No, of course she doesn't, the unrepentant, incontrovertible, self-satisfied, cold-blooded martyr that she is. Not once has my mother looked back on her life and thought: hey, what's the common denominator here? Is this just a matter of loads of really shit things happening to a really good person, or am I a shit person attracting exactly what I deserve?

When Elle had her children - at 21, 23 and 26 years old - my mother did little to intervene or help, although I am sure she must have experienced a LOT of distress over this, which I would never dare underestimate. Hell, I know the woman IS a human being with a heart, even though I myself have experienced only tiny, fleeting glimpses of her humanness, and even less of her 'heart'.

Yet while her own parents had bent over backwards for her when she was a young, unprepared mum, my mother never once presumed that, as a 'grown up' mother now herself (indeed a mature woman in her 40s by now), maybe it was time for her to stop being selfish, time to finally put her daughter first. She knew those babies would have to be removed from Elle; she knew that poor lost soul was incapable of looking after herself, never mind a child (note: Elle loved her children. She LOVED them, because as crazy as she was, the 'mothering' part of her was absolutely intact.) And our mother knew that every time a baby was taken from her, it worsened Elle's torment. Perhaps our mother felt she had no other choice; what, realistically, could she do? Well, I know one thing with certainty: she COULD have done more, and she SHOULD have done more. If Elle wasn't crazy with schizophrenia and drugs already, she soon became crazy with grief: can you even imagine having all three of your babies taken away from you?

I do believe that sometimes insanity is a 'sanctuary' for abused or damaged people, the ultimate 'buffer' against the agony of real life, of truth. As the blogger at House of Mirrors (see Resources) says, Madness is their [the narcissist's] preferred choice over reality.

Obviously, it's ultimately self-destructive, but that's kind of the point: some of us just want to escape from life, because reality is so intolerable and brutal. What makes my mother's insanity different from my half-sister's insanity is that my mother PROJECTS hers, so that EVERYONE ELSE feels insane unless they concur with her. It's relatively easy to concur with my mother because she appears, superficially, unassailable. Her 'version of the truth', which at its core is mostly comprised of delusions and spurious beliefs and is therefore pretty far removed from reality, is presented with accomplished aplomb as "All You Should Believe In"; it is presented as a compulsion, not a choice. And I believed in it for far too long. My reality was distorted by someone too sick to see it.

But Elle took all her pain out on herself; nobody was punished for it but herself, and she never expected anyone else to believe in her hallucinations and delusions. In her more lucid moments, she knew she was crazy, whereas my mother has no such insight into her disordered mind. And, ultimately, Elle's craziness made her more human. It had the opposite effect on our mother. (See my post Are malignant narcissists evil?, which also quotes from the 'House of Mirrors' blog: "Mental illness is not the cause of malignant narcissism; it’s the result of malignant narcissism…")  [my emphasis]

If anybody needs me to justify my 'No Contact' decision, I respectfully ask that person how much they value their mind; their sense of what is Real, Right and True. I ask them to use their imagination to spend one day in my shoes as a child, living in that tense, frosty house with a sick, psychotic woman consumed by fear, fury and hatred. I ask them to try to have a modicum of respect for what my half-sister went through, and to understand that I am doing this because I finally understand her (at least I understand her much, much better than I understand my mother). I do not choose insanity myself, but I do appreciate why somebody would. I realise it's not really a choice at all, actually; not like the choice to abandon, neglect or abuse your children, for example.  

But sometimes, yes, it really is just the best available option.

"The mind is endless. You put me in a dark solitary cell and to you that's the end; to me it's the beginning. There's a world in there, and I'm free." - Charles Manson


Many songs of the 70s and 80s remind me of Elle - "Heroes" and "Ashes to Ashes" by David Bowie, "Breathe" by Pink Floyd, "Borderline" by Madonna, "Breakfast in America" by Supertramp, but this is the song I remember first hearing with Elle, back in 1984, and the one that always brings back the fondest memories: Nena's 99 Red Balloons

Resources: 

House of Mirrors: Malignant Narcissists are Batshit Crazy